Pollster: Mayor result ‘sobering’

Pollster Jay Leve says Kevin Faulconer’s trouncing of David Alvarez in Tuesday’s mayoral election after his SurveyUSA poll released Sunday showed the race a virtual dead heat is humbling.

“It was a sobering lesson that history doesn’t always repeat itself,” Leve said Wednesday, adding that a large number of people who said they would be voting for Alvarez failed to materialize. “I conclude that a lot of Alvarez supporters who talked the talk didn’t walk the walk.”

Leve is founder and editor of New Jersey-based SurveyUSA, which conducted polls commissioned by U-T San Diego and 10News throughout the special election race to replace Bob Filner. Its last poll showed Faulconer leading Alvarez by just 1 percent when it questioned 632 “likely” voters who said they had already turned in mail ballots or were likely to vote.

A similar SurveyUSA poll released Jan. 26 had Faulconer up by 5 percent; one released Jan. 12 had the eventual winner up by 16 percent. Faulconer won Tuesday’s election by 9 percent.

SurveyUSA has conducted political polling in San Diego for two decades. While some question its methodology using an English-only, recorded voice to conduct its polls, Leve rejected such criticism. If anything, Latinos were overrepresented in his final poll, he said.

“Polling is not an exact science,” he said. “I’m not sure we see any systemic or fundamental flaw, but we look with humility at the results. We’ll get em’ next time.”

All the SurveyUSA polls had a plus or minus margin of error of about 4 percent.

Faulconer pollster John Nienstedt of Competitive Edge Research and Communication said his final poll had Faulconer getting 52.5 percent and Alvarez 47.5 with undecideds inconsequential. Tuesday’s results had Faulconer winning with 54.5 percent to 45.5 percent for Alvarez.

Nienstedt uses live interviewers and focuses exclusively on registered voters which he maintained leads to more accurate findings.